acb Gallery presents the solo exhibition of Róbert Batykó (1981), a selection from the artist’s latest paintings. The enigmatic spaces and ambiguous compositions that appear in his new paintings constitute a new step forward in his consistently, coherently constructed oeuvre. In the past few years, Batykó turned towards the poetics of glitches of digital encoding, the leftovers of digital image processing and their painterly potential. In his newest series however, Batykó also reflects on basic questions raised by post-digital painting: not only does he question our relationship to digital images, but he also aims, in his painterly processes, to depict the flow of image characteristic of our times.

For Tibor Várnagy’s (1957) first exhibition at acb, a selection of photos without a camera created between 1985 and 1988 is presented in the space of acb Attachment. New wave was Várnagy’s main source of inspiration for the cameraless experiments he realized in the 80s, and in which neither does he reference the avant-garde photograms nor the photo-language of conceptual art. The three series featured in the exhibition entitled TV Contacts (1983-1987), Fire Contacts (1987) and Black Squares (1988) were all created with different cameraless techniques. The three series are presented for the first time together in one solo exhibition, two decades after their creation. Their rediscovery is not only an important act in the history of the Várnagy oeuvre, but also in the history of Hungarian photography.

Katalin Nádor (1938-2018) was known as the photographer of the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs where she worked for decades. Her name was also associated with the documentation of performances and exhibitions realized by the Pécs Workshop. The independent, experimental, lyrical abstract photographical work she developed in parallel in the course of the sixties and seventies did not receive any professional attention, albeit rooting in the visual heritage of György Kepes’ and László Moholy-Nagy’s photography, and reflecting on the contemporary, new constructivist, geometric artistic endeavours of the Pécs art scene. Her photograms, graphical still-life analyses reveal a sensitive, singular artistic perspective that examines the aesthetical relation and reciprocity between nature and architecture, landscape and object through the lens of abstract photography.

The selection presented in acb NA constitutes the first solo exhibition of Katalin Nádor in Hungary, following the international recognition her work received at Paris Photo 2018. The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual book published by acb ResearchLab.